On the eve of the second enrollment period for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, there is good news, bad news and still many unknowns about the federal law’s impact. In 2010, President Obama signed legislation, widely known as “Obamacare,” into law with the goal of improving access to health care for millions of Americans. State and federal officials began working toward that goal in earnest in October 2013, when Americans could begin signing up for health insurance, for the first time, on the marketplaces created by the law. But one year later, we don’t know exactly how many uninsured Americans signed up for health insurance and, more importantly, who is still without coverage. The good news: Rates of uninsured people have dropped in every state.

With the Supreme Court set to rule on Harris v. Quinn, a case that could limit the collective bargaining rights of 20,000 home care workers in Illinois, we wondered what difference union representation has made in their lives. It comes down to much better wages, health insurance, and professional training, longtime homecare workers told us. And across the board, they say, these improvements mean a higher quality of care for their clients, thousands of seniors and people with disabilities. In many cases it means people are able to stay in their own homes and live independently, rather than being forced in to nursing homes. That translates into huge savings for the state.

The petcoke controversy on Chicago’s Southeast Side is another example of the heightened environmental costs of every stage of tar sands oil production — and yet another case of low-income communities of color bearing the brunt of those hardships.

Two years after Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel shut down half of the city’s mental health clinics, the Mental Health Movement is charging that the city “is sabotaging its remaining services by refusing to serve people getting health benefits through the Affordable Care Act.” Tens of thousands of Chicagoans signed up for CountyCare, Cook County’s early rollout of ACA’s Medicaid expansion, but the city chose not to join the CountyCare network. A health department spokesman told the Tribune last month that current clients who enroll in Medicaid will be able to keep seeing their therapists. But a clinic staff member told me recently he’d been instructed not to accept CountyCare enrollees as new patients and to transfer patients who joined CountyCare to private providers. “The city is pushing people out and they’re not following up to see if they are getting care,” said N’Dana Carter of the MHM.

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Founded on the heels of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, The Chicago Reporter confronts racial and economic inequality, using the power of investigative journalism. Our mission is national but grounded in Chicago, one of the most segregated cities in the nation and a bellwether for urban policies.